It is a cinematic truth universally acknowledged that number patterns apply both to high and low art. Just as the new Star Trek movie is bound to be bad because the last one was quite good, so Robert Altman's new film had to be great after last year's appalling Gingerbread Man. With Cookie's Fortune, which opened the Sundance Film Festival, all traumatic lingering images of Kenneth Branagh as a sexy Southern lawyer vanish. Altman has more than redeemed himself with this genuinely tragi-comic tale of a dysfunctional Southern family. And after five years, now, of being a festival princess, Liv Tyler finally gives a performance worthy of the hype.

The Robert Redford-inspired Sundance festival is dedicated to film-makers "of independent vision" and one thing they have in common is poverty. In theory, if they succeed at here they won't be skint much longer. In practice, however, they frequently remain so. Year after year films highly touted here have fallen flat at the box-office. But year after year, reputations if not fortunes are made.